University Archives

This project presents a real-time aircraft monitoring system using a low-cost software-defined radio to capture ADS-B transmissions from overhead aircraft. A USB RTL-SDR receiver and 1090 MHz antenna collect broadcast telemetry including aircraft position, altitude, speed, and identification data. The dump1090 decoder streams this data to a Python pipeline, where it is parsed, filtered, and stored in a structured SQLite database. Preliminary results demonstrate successful reception of multiple aircraft with position updates every 1–2 seconds, revealing climb, cruise, and descent trajectories. Data quality analysis shows approximately 65% of received messages contain valid positional information, providing a substantial dataset for analysis. This work addresses real-time pattern recognition challenges in streaming telemetry and demonstrates practical SDR-based sensing for aviation analytics.